The Atom And Us
With the Doomsday Clock the closest it's ever been to midnight, Jane Corbin investigates the proliferation of nuclear weapons across the globe. She visits Los Alamos, home to the United States’ nuclear weapons development facility and the historic home of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project. In Scotland, she reveals the strategy behind Britain’s nuclear deterrent, and speaks to campaigners in Suffolk fighting against US weapons they fear will be based on UK soil. Jane also discovers how many of the global agreements and safeguards that have constrained the spread of nuclear weapons since the 1970s are breaking down. This is a story told by the scientists, investigators and diplomats who set the clock and have fought to ensure that the ultimate deterrent has not been used in over 70 years.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Soviet Navy officer Vasily Arkhipov refused to launch a nuclear strike and saved the world from nuclear war and total destruction.
A cinematic, character-driven insight to what it meant to produce and to own a car in communist times: the Socialist propaganda dreams and the hard reality of living that dream. The freedom that these slow and clumsy vehicles were giving to their owners; the cars as an instrument in the Cold War battle; legends and homemade tune-ups as an attempt to stand at least a little bit off the crowd.
Like the best USIA films, The Wall distills political events into an emotionally clear and compelling ideological "story". In 1962 Walter de Hoog gathered footage from U.S. and German newsreel sources and crafted this taut short film about the first year of the Berlin Wall. Straightforward, keenly balanced narration portrays Berliners as "accepting the wall but never resigned to it". The extraordinary footage of the first escapes was propaganda enough-- His challenge was to make the politics human.
Peter Ustinov hosts this haunting 1980 documentary exploring the world's nuclear weaponry and the fragile system that deters either side from initiating the first nuclear strike. Although the world's political climate has mellowed since the Cold War era, Nuclear Nightmares takes the viewer back in time to gain a perspective of what it was like to live under a very real nuclear threat.
The story of the 1978 World Chess Championship between the Soviet Communist Party's protege, Anatoly Karpov and the traitor and Soviet defector, Viktor Korchnoi. One of those instances in life where truth is stranger than fiction.
Documentary portrait of Karel Köcher, supposedly the most important communist agent to infiltrate the CIA.
This documentary examines unidentified aerial phenomenon. With testimony from high-ranking government officials, and NASA Astronauts, Senator Harry Reid says it "makes the incredible credible."
A 40-day, 40-night road trip to the Trinity Site—where the first atomic bomb was detonated in the summer of 1945—covering many other atomic destinations and driving deep into the natural and social history of the American southwest.
This film shows how far we have come since the cold-war days of the 50s and 60s. Back then the Russians were our "enemies". And to them the Americans were their "enemies" who couldn't be trusted. Somewhere in all this a young girl in Oklahoma named Shannon set her sights on becoming one of those space explorers, even though she was told "girls can't do that." But she did.
Documentary telling the real story of the Cambridge Spies - subject of the drama series A Spy Among Friends.
A disturbing collection of 1940s and 1950s United States government-issued propaganda films designed to reassure Americans that the atomic bomb was not a threat to their safety.
In 1967, in the middle of the Cold War, Joseph Stalin's only daughter goes to the American embassy in New Delhi and asks for asylum. Svetlana leaves behind her country and her two children. Hunted by the press, the KGB, and many admirers, the woman, nicknamed the Kremlin princess, will never cease to flee. From the summit of the Soviet empire to the solitude and poverty of her last years in a Wisconsin home, Gabriel Tejedor traces the destiny of a resolutely free woman, at the very heart of the century and its geopolitical challenges.
Two physicists discover psychic abilities are real only to have their experiments at Stanford co-opted by the CIA and their research silenced by the demands of secrecy. This is the true story of Russell Targ and America's Cold War psychic spies, disclosed and declassified for the first time, with evidence presented by a Nobel laureate, an Apollo astronaut, and the military and scientific community that has been suppressed for nearly 30 years.
U.S. nuclear tests in space, and the development of the military intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
In August 1962, director Leslie Woodhead made a two-minute film in Liverpool's Cavern Club with a raw and unrecorded group of rockers called the Beatles. He arranged their first live TV appearances on a local show in Manchester and watched as the Fab Four phenomenon swept the world. Twenty-five years later while making films in Russia, Woodhead became aware of how, even though they were never able to play in the Soviet Union, the Beatles' legend had soaked into the lives of a generation of kids. This film meets the Soviet Beatles generation and hears their stories about how the Fab Four changed their lives, including Putin's deputy premier Sergei Ivanov, who explains how the Beatles helped him learn English and showed him another life. (Storyville)
The '60s. Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, two amateur radio enthusiasts, listened to sound from space with home-built equipment in their hometown of Turin. But one night, they recorded something quite different from the usual static that would change their lives forever...
The fascinating history of the U.S. Air Force comes to life via vintage footage culled from official Air Force newsreels that were created to educate the public during wartime. Formed in World War I as a tiny airborne offshoot of the Army's American Expeditionary Force, the division subsequently grew into its own armed services branch and became the largest modern air force in the world.
Drawing from the recent book, Reagan: The Life by best-selling biographer H.W. Brands, this Ronald Reagan biography dives deep into the pivotal events that shaped his life. Dramatic recreations reveal the untold, behind-the-scenes moments that shaped the trajectory of his career. Interviews and rare archival material illustrate his life through the Great Depression, WWII, Hollywood’s Golden Age, The Cold War, an assassination attempt (not unlike Bill O’Reilly’s book and recent Nat Geo movie, Killing Reagan), and public and personal heartache.